A Partnership That Let Us Breathe: Outset Art and the Stellenbosch Triennale 2025

Outset Contemporary Art Fund supported the Stellenbosch Triennale 2025 as its main patron, helping bring to life a process-led exhibition rooted in care, breath, and artistic freedom.

From its earliest moments, Stellenbosch Triennale 2025 set its intention: to make space for stillness, slowness, and breath; in art, and in life. Under the theme Ba’zinzile: A Rehearsal for Breathing, this edition sought not just to exhibit, but to rehearse; not just to show, but to share.

Making space for this kind of intentional, improvised, and process-led exhibition doesn’t happen by default. It requires partners who believe in art’s power to expand thought, invite discomfort, and create conditions for real change. We found this kind of partnership in the Outset Contemporary Art Fund.

Their support as our main patron allowed the Triennale to unfold with depth and generosity, giving artists time to create on site, allowing audiences to reflect in situ, and giving the curatorial vision room to breathe.

As Andi Norton, Founding Trustee and Project Director, explains:

“Receiving the Transformative Award from Outset Partners is an honour and a privilege. It allows the Stellenbosch Triennale to continue showcasing the best contemporary art from Africa, by some of the most exciting established and emerging artists, in a non-commercial space at the southern tip of the continent. The Stellenbosch Triennale celebrates and encourages exploration, innovation and curiosity. It is a platform for artists to expand their imaginations without worrying about sales and commissions. At the same time, it encourages and invites audiences to engage in critical dialogue and reflection, resulting in conversations and debates which, while sometimes uncomfortable, pave the way for new ways of thinking and exciting paradigm shifts.”

It is this kind of freedom — to explore without expectation, to create without compromise - that shaped the soul of ST2025. Artists worked collectively and improvisationally, building works that responded to the land, to each other, and to the air between us.

Khanyisile Mbongwa, Head Curator, shares:

“In curating the Stellenbosch Triennale, I am interested in finding ways of curating an international festival that carries the markings of where it is from – a site at the Southernmost tip of Africa, engaging the diasporic movement of Africans as a result of colonialism, slavery, ongoing crises, and other fantastic curiosities. As we prepare for the Triennale we are going within and towards the ecological, to find out what it might mean to work with a sense of care and compassion – for the environment, for our practices, for a global indigenous community. This award will allow us to develop and extend this practice of caring, by engaging with festival-making as a form of rehearsal for things that can happen in the real world.”

Outset’s backing helped us build a Triennale that wasn’t just about showcasing art, but about rehearsing a future. A future shaped by compassion, complexity, and creativity.

To Outset: thank you for choosing to be part of this breath. You’ve helped us rehearse what it means to live — and make — with care.